If 500 customers did this, I think the SEC would label this as a "security" and the company would be required to register as a public company, more or less. Th

If 500 customers did this, I think the SEC would label this as a "security" and the company would be required to register as a public company, more or less. This is essentially what happened to Facebook which led to them going public: the private equity pool became too diverse and triggered this threshold, so publicly listing made sense. Why don't Kickstarter campaigns have this problem? AFAIK it's because they are just presales, there's no notion of ownership so they aren't treated as securities. A poorly-designed kickstarter that looked like micro stocks would probably get shot down.